Bond proposals pitch parks and libraries and … jobs?

The promoters of five city bond measures have for two months been promoting the trails, police station and libraries created if voters approve Proposition A through E on Nov. 6.

In a television commercial they started airing this week, they began touting something else that gets created: jobs.

“We’ll create up to 12,000 good, local jobs,” a perky narrator intones as accelerated footage shows an industrious hive of workers in hard hats scurrying around a construction site.

Sue Davis, spokeswoman for Vote for Houston’s Future, said the jobs are mostly construction-related employment to carry out the projects funded by the $410 million in borrowing the city seeks, not permanent jobs.

Update: Davis informs me via email that the campaign didn’t just start talking about jobs. She said it’s been part of the campaign since the beginning. I don’t remember having seen or heard it as part of the pitch.

Bond measure opponents such as Dave Wilson and his Responsible Government Spending PAC are dubious, of course, and wonder how the number was cooked up.

Davis said it’s based on the work of economist Daniel Shoag, an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. In this academic paper, Shoag concludes that $35,000 of government spending generates a job. She book-ended that study with citations by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, who posits that each $50,000 of federal stimulus created a job, and a more difficult to track down citation of Gabriel Chodorow-Reich of the National Bureau of Economic Research that pegs the cost of a government-created job at $26,000. Davis said the campaign found the three figures and picked the middle one for the commercial.